On 8 February, the Bank of England issued a statement that was seen by many as a warning for earlier and speedier than previously anticipated increases in the UK base rate. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, referred in his statement to ‘recent forecasts’ which make it more likely that ‘monetary policy would need to be tightened somewhat earlier and by a somewhat greater extent over the forecast period than anticipated at the time of the November report’.

A similar picture emerges on the other side of the Atlantic. With labour markets continuing to deliver spectacularly high rates of employment (the highest in the last 17 years), there are also now signs that wages are on an upward trajectory. According to a recent report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, US wage growth has been stronger than expected, with average hourly earnings rising by 2.9 percent – the strongest growth since 2009.

These statements have coincided with a week of sharp corrections and turbulence in the world’s largest capital markets, as investors become increasingly conscious of the threat of rising inflation – and the possibility of tighter monetary policy.

The Dow Jones plunged from an all-time high of 26,186 points on 1 February to 23,860 a week later – losing more than 10 per cent of its value in just five trading sessions (suffering a 4.62 percentag fall on 5 February alone – the worst one-day point fall since 2011). European and Asian markets followed suit, with the FTSE-100, DAX and NIKKEI all suffering heavy losses in excess of 5 per cent over the same period.

But why should higher inflationary expectations fuel a sell-off in global capital markets? After all, what firm wouldn’t like to sell its commodities at a higher price? Well, that’s not entirely true. Investors know that further increases in inflation are likely to be met by central banks hiking interest rates. This is because central banks are unlikely to be willing or able to allow inflation rates to rise much above their target levels.

The Bank of England, for instance, sets itself an inflation target of 2%. The actual ongoing rate of inflation reported in the latest quarterly Inflation Report is 3% (50 per cent higher than the target rate).

Any increase in interest rates is likely to have a direct impact on both the demand and the supply side of the economy.

Consumers (the demand side) would see their cost of borrowing increase. This could put pressure on households that have accumulated large amounts of debt since the beginning of the recession and could result in lower consumer spending.

Firms (the supply side) are just as likely to suffer higher borrowing costs, but also higher operational costs due to rising wages – both of which could put pressure on profit margins.

It now seems more likely that we are coming towards the end of the post-2008 era – a period that saw the cost of money being driven down to unprecedentedly low rates as the world’s largest economies dealt with the aftermath of the Great Recession.

For some, this is not all bad news – as it takes us a step closer towards a more historically ‘normal’ equilibrium. It remains to be seen how smooth such a transition will be and to what extent the high-leveraged world economy will manage to keep its current pace, despite the increasingly hawkish stance in monetary policy by the world’s biggest central banks.

Questions

Using supply and demand diagrams, explain the likely effect of an increase in interest rates to equilibrium prices and output. Is it good news for investors and how do you expect them to react to such hikes? What other factors are likely to influence the direction of the effect?

Do you believe that the current ultra-low interest rates could stay with us for much longer? Explain your reasoning.

What is likely to happen to the exchange rate of the pound against the US dollar, if the Bank of England increases interest rates first?

Why do stock markets often ‘overshoot’ in responding to expected changes in interest rates or other economic variables

Bitcoin
Bitcoin was created in 2009 by an unknown person, or people, using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. It is a digital currency in the form of a line of computer code. Bitcoins are like ‘electronic cash’ which can be held or used for transactions, with holdings and transactions heavily encrypted for security – hence it is a form of ‘crytocurrency’. People can buy and sell bitcoins for normal currencies as well as using them for transactions. People’s holdings are held in electronic ‘wallets’ and can be accessed on their computers or phones via the Internet. Transfers of bitcoins from one person or organisation to another are recorded in a public electronic ledger in the form of a ‘blockchain‘.

The supply of bitcoins is not controlled by central banks; rather, it is determined by a process known as ‘mining’. This involves individuals or groups solving complex and time-consuming mathematical problems and being rewarded with a new block of bitcoins.

The supply of bitcoins is currently growing at around 150 per hour and the current supply is around ₿16.7 million. However, the number of new bitcoins in a block is halved for every 210,000 blocks. This means that the rate of increase in the supply of bitcoins is slowing – the number generated being halved roughly every four years. The supply will eventually reach a maximum of ₿21 million, probably sometime in the next century, but around 99% will have been mined by around 2032.

The bitcoin bubble
The price of bitcoins has soared in recent months and especially in the past two. On 4 October, the price of a bitcoin was $4226; by 7 December it was nearly four times higher, at $16,858 – a rise of 399% in just nine weeks. Many people have claimed that this is a bubble, which will soon burst. Already there have been severe fluctuations. By December 10, for example, the price had fallen at one point to $13,152 – a fall of nearly 22% in just two days – only to recover to over $15,500 within a few hours.

So what determines the price of bitcoin? The simple answer is very straightforward – it’s determined by demand and supply. But what has been happening to demand and supply and why? And what will happen in the near and more distant future?

As we have seen, the supply is limited by the process of mining, which allows a relatively stable, but declining, increase. The explanation of the recent price rise and what will happen in the future lies on the demand side. Increasing numbers of people have been buying bitcoin, not because they want to use it for transactions, whether legitimate or illegal over the dark web, but because they want to invest in bitcoin. In other words, they want to hold bitcoin as an asset which is increasing in value. These people are known as ‘hodlers’ – a deliberate misspelling of ‘holders’.

But this speculation is of the destabilising form. The more prices have risen, the more people have bought bitcoin, thus pushing the price up further. This is a classic bubble, whereby the price does not reflect an underlying value, but rather the exuberance of buyers.

The problem with bubbles is that they will burst, but just when is virtually impossible to predict with any accuracy. If the price of bitcoins falls, what will happen next depends on how the fall is interpreted. It could be interpreted as a temporary fall, caused by some people cashing in to take advantage of the higher prices. At the same time, other people, believing that it is only a temporary fall, will rush to buy, snapping up bitcoins at the temporary low price. This ‘stabilising speculation’ will move the price back up again.

However, the fall in price may be seen as the bubble bursting, with even bigger falls ahead. In this case, people will rush to sell before it falls further, thereby pushing the price even lower. This destabilising speculation will amplify the fall in prices.

But even if the bubble does burst, people may believe that another bubble will then occur and, once they think the bottom has been reached, will thus start buying again and there will be a second speculative rise in the price.

The crash could be very short-lived. This happened with the second biggest cryptocurrency, Ethereum. On 21 June this year, the price at the beginning of the day was $360. It then began to fall during the say. Once its price reached $315, it then collapsed by 96% to $13 with massive selling, much of it automatic with computers programmed to sell when the price falls by more than a certain amount. But then, on the same day, it rebounded. Within minutes it had bounced back and was trading at $337 at the end of the day. It is now trading at around $450 – up from around $300 four weeks ago.

Whether the bubble in bitcoin has more to inflate, when it will burst, and when it will rebound and by how much, depends on people’s expectations. But what we are looking at here is people’s expectations of what other people are likely to do – in other words, of other people’s expectations, which in turn depend on their expectations of other people’s expectations. This situation is known as a Keynesian Beauty Contest (see the blog, A stock market beauty contest of the machines). Perhaps we need a crystal ball.

‘There is no magic money tree’, said Theresa May on several occasions during the 2017 election campaign. The statement was used to justify austerity policies and to criticise calls for increased government expenditure.

But, in one sense, money is indeed fruit of the magic money tree. There is no fixed stock of money, geared to the stock of gold or some other commodity. Money is created – as if by magic. And most of broad money is not created by government or the central bank. Rather it is created by banks as they use deposits as the basis for granting loans, which become money as they are redeposited in the banking system. Banks are doing this magic all the time – creating more and more money trees as the forest grows. As the Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin explains:

Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money.

However, most of the country’s MPs are unaware of this process of money creation. As the linked Guardian article below states:

Responding to a survey commissioned by Positive Money just before the June election, 85% were unaware that new money was created every time a commercial bank extended a loan, while 70% thought that only the government had the power to create new money.

And yet the role of money and monetary policy is central to many debates in Parliament about the economy. It is disturbing to think that policy debates could be based on misunderstanding. Perhaps MPs would do well to study basic monetary economics! After all, credit creation is not a difficult topic.

What is the relationship between government spending and broad money supply (M4 in the UK)?

Why is there no simple money multiplier whereby total broad money supply is a simple and predictable multiple of narrow money?

What determines the relationship between money supply and real output?

Does it matter what type of lending is financed by money creation?

Comment on the statement: “The argument marshalled against social investment such as education, welfare and public services, that it is unaffordable because there is no magic money tree, is nonsensical.”

Could quantitative easing be used to finance social investment? Would there be any dangers in the process?

We have reported frequently in our blogs about concerns over rising debt levels among UK households. We previously noted the concerns expressed in July 2014 by the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) that the growth in consumer credit (unsecured lending) was stretching the financial well-being of individuals with implications for the resilience of lenders’ credit portfolios. Now the Chief Executive of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Andrew Bailey, in an interview to the BBC has identified the growing problem of debt among young people.

In his interview Mr Bailey stresses that the growth in debt amongst younger people is not ‘reckless borrowing’ and so not borne out of a lack of willpower or ‘present bias’ (see John’s blog Nudging mainstream economists). Rather, it is borrowing simply to meet basic living costs.

In his interview Mr Bailey goes on to identify generational shifts in patterns of wealth and debt. He notes:

There are particular concentrations [of debt] in society, and those concentrations are particularly exposed to some of the forms and practices of high cost debt which we are currently looking at very closely because there are things in there that we don’t like.

There has been a clear shift in the generational pattern of wealth and income, and that translates into a greater indebtedness at a younger age. That reflects lower levels of real income, lower levels of asset ownership. There are quite different generational experiences.

Mr Bailey goes on to echo concerns expressed back in July by the Prudential Regulation Authority in relation to the growth in consumer credit. The chart illustrates the scale of the accumulation of consumer credit (unsecured lending) across all individuals in the UK. In August 2017 the stock of unsecured debt rose to £203 billion, the highest level since December 2008 when the financial crisis was unfolding. (Click here to download a PowerPoint of the chart).

In concluding his BBC interview, Mr Bailey notes that credit should be available to younger people. Credit helps individuals to ‘smooth income’ and that this is something which is increasingly important with more people having erratic incomes as the gig-economy continues to grow. However, he notes that credit provision needs to be “sustainable”.

An economy that becomes dependent on credit can, in turn, become acutely volatile. Too much credit and there exists the potential for financial distress which can result in an economic slowdown as people cut back on spending. Too little credit and the growth in aggregate demand is subdued. Some argue that this is what now faces a financialised economy like the UK. Even it this overstates the significance of credit, there is no doubt that UK credit data is keenly followed by economists and policymakers.

Recent rates of credit accumulation by individuals have raised concern. In July 2014 the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) of the Bank of England issued a statement voicing its concern that the growth in consumer credit, also known as unsecured lending, was stretching the financial well-being of individuals and that the resilience of lenders’ consumer credit portfolios was therefore reducing.

Chart 1 illustrates the scale of the flows of both consumer credit (unsecured lending) and mortgages (secured credit) from banks and building societies to individuals. It shows the amount of credit net of repayments lent over the last 12 months. In the 12 months to July 2017 the net accumulation of consumer credit was £18.2 billion while that of secured borrowing was £40.8 billion. Although the 12-month level of consumer credit accumulation was down from its recent peak of £19.2 billion in November 2016, total net lending (including secured lending) to individuals of £59.0 billion was its highest since September 2008. (Click here to download a PowerPoint of the chart).

To help put in context the size of flows of net lending Chart 2 shows the annual flows of consumer credit and secured debt as percentages of GDP. In this case each observation measures net lending over the past four quarters as a percentage of annual GDP. The latest observation is for 2017 Q2 and shows that the annual net flow of consumer credit was equivalent to 0.94 per cent of GDP while that for secured borrowing was 1.78 per cent of GDP. While the flows of consumer credit and secured borrowing as shares of national income have eased a little from their values in the second half of last year, they have not eased significantly. (Click here to download a PowerPoint of the chart).

Despite the recent strength of borrowing, levels are nothing like those seen in the mid 2000s. Nonetheless, we need to see the current accumulation of debt in the context of two important factors: debt already accumulated and the future macroeconomic environment. Chart 3 gives some insight to the first of these two by looking at stocks of debt outstanding as shares of GDP. The total debt-to-GDP ratio peaked 90 percent in 2009 before relatively slower growth in credit accumulation saw the ratio fall back. The ratio has now been at or around the 78 per cent level consistently for the past two or so years. (Click here to download a PowerPoint of the chart).

The ratio of the stock of consumer debt to GDP peaked in 2008 at 13.3 per cent. It too fell back reaching 9.05 per cent in the middle of 2014. Since that time the ratio has been rising and by the end of the second quarter of this year was 10.1 per cent. The PRA appears not only to be concerned by this but also the likely unwinding of what it describes as the ‘current benign macroeconomic environment and historically low arrears rates’.

Going forward, we might expect to see ever closer scrutiny not only of the aggregate indicators referred to here but of an array of credit indicators. The PRA statement, for example, refers to the number of , ‘0% interest credit card offers’, falling interest rates on unsecured personal loans and the growth of motor finance loans. The hope is that we can avoid the costs of financial distress that so starkly affected the economy in the late 2000s and that continue to cast a shadow over today’s economic prospects.